YouTube & H.264 Codec Discussion

Comments

I took your guys' word for it, and will continue to use HitFilm, despite the malfunction, and export it through H.264. I just wanted some sort of solution, because I read online that the H.264 sort of lowers the quality in a way, or something like that. I'm sorry folks. Hopefully this issue will get fixed.

And to answer Simon's question, I am running on a PC, specifically Windows 10 laptop. If you need more specs just let me know.

"...because I read online that the H.264 sort of lowers the quality in a way, or something like that"

AVC/H.264 is what Hitfilm is uploading for Youtube. AVC/H.264 is what Youtube uses for playback. The quality in highly compressed format is mostly determined by the average bitrate a file is encoded to.

The primary and mostly only thing you need to worry about adjusting here is the average bitrate. Then normally set the max bitrate at 50% higher than average. You will notice Hitfilm defaults to 10Mbps average and 15Mbps max.

The real thing is to always trust your eyes. They are the best and final judge. If portions of your video look blocky/blurry, then raise the average bitrate.

OK, so we're using that article for reference. If you scroll down the article you'll see a chart labeled "Feature Support in Particular Profiles.: It's got lots of green and pink in it, so it will jump off the page at you.

Hitfilm, by default, outputs in the "Main" profile at "Level 4.0." This is important to know, because, under Hitfilm default settings, you're outputing a file with a maximum of 30 frames per second and a maximum bitrate of 20mbps.

The "Main" Profile was originally developed for SD application and broadcast. By pulling down the Profile drop-down you can set this to "High." High is the profile developed for HD broadcast, and is also the profile used for Blu-Ray discs. This is a better output option overall than the Main profile.

The "Level" option should be changed from 4.0 to 5.1. The advantages of this are changing your maxumum bitrate from 20mbps to 240,000mbps, and allowing for 60fps output and 4K output.

Notes on bitrate: If you're shooting on a prosumer HDSLR or Camcorder, the chances are your footage was recorded at 28 to 35 mbps. Maybe 50, depending on the camera. If you actually need to prepare footage for Blu-Rays, generally that's around 20. Outputting an mp4 at anything higher than 50mbps will certainly help prevent any additional compression artifacts, but it's going to make your file size needlessly large. For all practical purposes, you should never need to output an mp4 at higher than 50 mbps--if you need that quality you're better rendering an image sequence and converting that to DNxHD anyway.

I would agree that we are mostly safe using High profile. It is hardly different from Main but every tiny bit can help.

We should never compare camera bitrates to encoding bitrates we can do on PCs. Cameras do not have the compute power or the time (they must be realtime) to do any sophisticated temporal compression analysis. MPEG-2 or AVC/H.264. An AVC/H.264 camera uses few, if any, of the tons of compression features available in the specification. Almost without exception the PC encoded bitrate can be much lower than the camera for the same visual quality. There is no rule one can go by for how much lower. We trust our eyes and learn what works for our source material.